Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Isaiah 11:1-10 & Matthew 3:1-12

The Peaceful Kingdom. That is the title, the heading, for this passage from Isaiah in the New Revised Standard Version. Isaiah lists all of these signs of peace – wolves living with lambs, cows and bears grazing together, a children placing their hands in a den of snakes. It’s lovely imagery and I’m also not sticking my hand into a hole in the ground anytime soon. For the signs are not here. Wolves don’t lie down with lambs, they devour them. And lions don’t eat straw. The Kingdom is not peaceful.

Of course they knew that then, and they didn’t actually see those signs, either. But Isaiah persists. He knows they see a dead stump, the possibilities of growth and renewal and life cut down by the forces around them. So, he imagines the shoot sprouting forth from what is thought dead, he imagines possibility where there is none. What he does NOT imagine is Jesus, for Isaiah is speaking to his time – this is not a predictive text, but a hopeful one. So hopeful that the followers of Jesus, some hundreds of years later, would borrow this language to make sense of Jesus in their time, inspired by that same hope. Isaiah’s words speak beyond his time 300 years ago, they speak past 2,000 years ago during the days of Jesus, they speak even to us today – for it’s always hard to imagine wolves lying down with lambs. It’s equally hard to imagine peace, because we don’t know what that looks like.

My two children have never lived in a United States that wasn’t at war. Let me say that again – 17^th year old senior in high school and my 15 year old sophomore have not been alive during a time of “peace,” defined by us not being at war. I’m not sure that’s peace, but it does seem the bare minimum. Any dreams we might have of a world with no war are just that – dreams. In fact, they’re not even dreams, for a whole generation doesn’t know what it means to not be at war. Historians note that during the reign of Augustus Caesar, from 27 BCE – 14 CE, the Roman army was not engaged in combat somewhere in the vastness of the empire for a total of 35 days. That’s 35 days in 41 years! The Pax Romana, the Roman “peace,” was anything but peaceful, and the people who wrote our scriptures knew it…they lived it. They lived it so much, and for so long, that they began to think of peace as something beyond the absence of war, as something other than a blissful utopia (which seemed a pipe dream). They began to think of peace as something more than just quiet.

Peace may not seem like a natural state for us, given that we’re always warring with one another. Then again, maybe it is our natural state, one that we’ve ignored or been tempted away from, like the Eden fable reveals…part of us, but so covered up by other stuff that we have to do some heavy-duty excavation. The Baptist’s coarse language, a shock during this relatively joyous time of Advent, insists that we have to do this kind of work. We have to turn around – to literally change direction. Nothing short of that abrupt shift will do. You can’t ease into it, or decide that you can have peace after all the conditions are just so. It is a trajectory, an orientation. Now, what this passage fails to impart is that the act of repentance isn’t a singular event. You don’t just do it once, wash your hands and move on. You have to choose it again and again and again. For there’s a rip current in this world, dragging us in a particular direction, at it isn’t towards peace, unless that “peace” is something being sold to us.

The word that is most often translated as peace in the Greek Testament is eirene, from the verb eiro, which means to join or bind together that which has been separated. It conveys a sense of internal well-being, of harmony, and not the absence of conflict or stress. Eirene forms the basis of our word in English – serene, as in serenity. And serenity isn’t a place, it is a state of being. Problem is, we get sold serenity (or peace) like they’re some place, some state we can permanently achieve if we have the right thing, or enough money, or the right house, or, worse yet, it’s a pill or a drink that can magically transport us to that idealized locale whenever the stresses get too much.

Like the people on the side of the Jordan with John, we can easily think that a ritual or an external action will bring us this prized thing we call peace. It works off an old and seemingly intractable theology – an act of ritual will appease God, avert judgement, and set the world right. But that’s not what John says. He tells those surrounding him to repent, not offering up his baptism as a magic fix at all, just an outward sign of what he asserts must happen inside.

Repent. When you’ve done something that doesn’t make for peace, turn around. Make a different choice. You don’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. Yes, repentance means judgment, but we should be very precise with that word in light of the ways it has been misused. This kind of judgment is what you pronounce on yourself, or with the help of people who love and know you. It is recognition that we are not perfect, that we make mistakes. Such judgment may bring with it some healthy guilt for things done wrong, but it does not shame. It recognizes the thing that we all have in common – we all mess up. We all make poor decisions. We all miss the mark.

And when we do, what we do next can make for peace, or not. It can leave us feeling free, or like we are trapped, imprisoned by that mistake. We have all known someone, or perhaps we ARE someone, who has borne the weight of a mistake in the past but never engaged in the work needed to make amends for that mistake. So, we bear it…and then it becomes so much a part of us that we cannot release it, we even get defensive about it if someone brings it up. We do this as individuals and also as a culture. We will soon recognize 100 years since the race massacre here in Tulsa, an event that we seem unable to recognize effectively or release fully, because we don’t repent, and WON’T repent because it would mean admitting we have been wrong, wrong in the way that we have structured our systems, wrong in the ways that we value each other and wrong in our legendary stories we tell about our city, state and nation. So, it lingers…it hangs on us, and it’s impact imprisons us just as surely as if we were locked away.

Repentance is about setting ourselves free, not about shame. And it’s more than just personal, it is something we do for ourselves AND something we can and should do as a whole people. Isaiah calls for ISRAEL to repent – the whole nation. And John speaks of us individually, but also knows, in fact will know in the most visceral sense very soon, of the power of political and social systems and what repentance must take place in a collective sense in order for them to change. Repentance, in this way of seeing it, is about freedom.

Remember that the appearance of John the Baptist, as Matthew points out by pulling in some words from Isaiah, is not about judgment, it’s about a return from exile! It is about escape from the exile in Babylon, in Isaiah’s context, and escape from the exile in the empire of Rome, in Matthew’s context. And the spiritualtruth here is that “turning around” delivers the kind of peace we seek. When we just go through the motions, when we talk a good game but do nothing, we are in trouble. When ritual replaces acts of mercy, when correct belief trumps love, we begin to hate and exclude those who do not bind their hand in the glove of our worship. We begin to breed the evil nastiness that is a nest of snakes, a brood of vipers, John would say.

John yells at us from knee deep in the muddy water – don’t think that repeated ritual or clinging to doctrinal purity will save you — do good all the time. This is, of course, an impossible directive. None of us can do good all of the time, so he follows with the call to repentance, for this is the formula that fosters something as vast and unachievable as salvation. This is the formula that brings us a sense of peace that lies beyond whether or not the circumstances are what we’d like them to be. For peace comes not from outside, but from within. When we root out the violence in our own hearts, when we practice living with compassion and mercy – first with ourselves and then with others – then real peace is possible. For learning to be peaceful as a spiritual practice is not for the peaceful times. Anyone can find peace when everything is going great and the world is calm. Peace as a spiritual practice is for the rough places, for the uphill slog, the heavy sledding. And peace as a spiritual practice begins with the act of contrition, with the acceptance of repentance as a way of life, for if we never become comfortable with owning and dealing with our mistakes, we will always be imprisoned by them. We don’t get to reconciliation without truth, we don’t get to forgiveness without confession, and we don’t get to wholeness without repentance.

When we forget this eternal truth, or when we turn it into a weapon to be used against other people instead of directed first and foremost at ourselves, we can create an atmosphere where another mass shooting happens and we do nothing, where another trans woman is murdered and we change no laws, where a 16 year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez can catch the flu and die in custody of our government which will deny, obfuscate and stay the course, because we cannot, or will not, turn away form the things that we think are good for us, which have brought us the same artificial peace that the Pax Romana brought, the lies and legends that have formed us as a nation, built on the hierarchy of human beings, and the subjugation of some by others. That may be many things, but it isn’t the Gospel that Jesus brings, nor is it peaceful.

The peace that Jesus promises belongs to a new way of being. And Advent is here to remind us that we do not seek the best of the world that is, we seek a new world altogether. For Jesus is born to usher in a new kin-dom, and Advent is our preparation time – preparation for a revolution of love and hope. A revolution that begins with us turning around, turning towards one another, and seeking a new way to be in the world, imagined in the voices of our youngest, pictured in the imagery of the season, set forth in the story of a baby born to us again – possibility itself wrapped in swaddling clothes, soft and vulnerable, and placed in the manger – a revolution of peace waiting to happen.

Come, O long expected Jesus – born to set ALL people free. Grant us the wisdom and the courage to accept our own salvation. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Matthew 1:1-17 & Matthew 24:36-44

This is how Advent begins – with a lengthy and kind of boring genealogy followed by a what seems like an “end times” warning, a kind of shocking tale in which one is taken and one is left. Doesn’t seem very much in the spirit of the season, no angels singing, no bells ringing, no mention of a sale at all. Matthew knew as he offered up his version of the gospel story that people needed more fuel for their imaginations. Perhaps they had read Mark’s gospel, written probably a decade earlier, or perhaps they had in their heads the myriad of stories told about Jesus, but it apparently wasn’t enough. They had all been waiting for Jesus to return, just as the stories told them, and they were tired of waiting. They wanted change now.

So, Matthew did some imagining for them, the trick of a good writer, and lifted up the memory of King David, the perhaps somewhat idealized King of Israel. And he made a connection to that image with some good Jewish tradition – through genealogy. Jesus was related to David, Matthew claimed, and by David to the line of Abraham. Now, any cursory examination of this long list of names reveals something pretty quickly – Jesus is being traced through his father, until his father’s line doesn’t match up, and Matthew switches, not once, not twice, but three times from the patrilineal line to the matrilineal, and then back again. Matthew’s genealogy is a pretzel, twisting and turning over on itself. And you might be asking – so what? I mean what does that really matter? One way to look at it is that Matthew was very interested in his readers seeing the story of Jesus, the figure of Jesus, as rooted in tradition.

Another way to see it is that Matthew wanted to impart something more subversive – so he made the genealogy switch not only to women, but even to foreign women – like Ruth – including everyone in Jesus’ story, as if the gospel cannot be told through patriarchal structures, nor through the lens of xenophobia. Yet we know that people in Matthew’s day would have looked around as they heard this and said to themselves – this is not the way things are. But, Matthew says, God calls to us in the midst of our anxiety about the state of the world and reminds us – it doesn’t have to be this way. So, even in such a simple thing, a genealogy, Matthew delivers to us the action of God that defies our expectations, and does not behave the way we anticipate. Jesus will also not behave the way we expect…he will speak in riddles and parables, and make us scratch our heads as much as warm our hearts, which brings us to the little apocalyptic piece later in Matthew’s gospel.

Now, I would not blame you if you hadn’t noticed that every Advent season begins with some version of an apocalyptic text from the Bible. So, before we even get to birth story, we have this account of the “end.”

Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left.

Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.

Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.

It doesn’t exactly scream “Merry Christmas,” does it? Any of you with “rapture theology” in your background will feel some familiar strains, complete with their overt message about the “chosen,” and, of course, the NOT chosen. I hate to break it to you, but you’re going to church here now, you’re no longer chosen. But the good news is, the whole rapture thing isn’t real anyway, so you have that going for you.

Meanwhile, the scriptural tradition IS having us focus on this thing we tend to call the “second coming”, at a time when we’ve got our eyes on the manger (and maybe our presents, too). Why is that? There is a lot of speculation that Matthew wrote his gospel to an audience that was growing weary of the wait. Jesus was supposed to set all things right, and things are not all right, so when was he coming back to finish the job? And this weariness was impacted greatly by the reality that things weren’t so great. The people through whom the Gospel spread most rapidly were on the downside of empire, they were poor, hungry, buffeted by crisis after crisis, subjected to the whims of a power structure they seemed unable to affect. Matthew, it seems, thought it was time to write an account of Jesus that took part in this so-called “apocalyptic” orientation, which we often completely misunderstand in our day and age.

An apocalyptic orientation was a common literary genre in ancient days, it worked from the belief that history is divided into two ages, two eons in Greek — a current, corrupt age (often called this world in a derogatory tone) that God would soon replace with a new, holy age (often called the Kingdom or the realm, or what we call the kin-dom, of God or heaven). The current Kingdom is marked by idolatry, sin, injustice, exploitation, sickness, violence, and death. The Kin-dom to come will be characterized by the community, forgiveness, mutual support, health, blessing between nature and humankind, and life – even life beyond life, what we have called eternal life. All of this “end” language is not about destruction, it’s about birth, which is never without pain or struggle. It doesn’t have to be this way, Matthew writes to his readers, but it won’t be easy to change it.

Advent is the season of waiting, our tradition tells us, but not the kind of waiting that happens in the Doctor’s office. Don’t grab a magazine, don’t pull out your phone, this is Advent waiting. It is like children waiting for Christmas morning, with anticipation and hope and imaginations for what isn’t yet but will be. It’s like an expectant mother waiting on a birth, something which she has no control over at all. It’s like waiting for the medicine to take effect, it’s here, but not yet here, hoped for, and anticipated. It IS coming…it is almost here.

I have to say that “almost here” is not a comforting feeling these days. For the things that feel “almost here” are things I don’t want. Peace doesn’t feel “almost here,” nor does hope, most of the time. What does feel close are negatives – feelings of dread or anxiousness more than hope or joy. It feels as though we’re close to tipping the balance in a direction I don’t want the balance to go, like we’re backtracking on gains made or victories won, and that’s hardly inspirational.

Maybe that’s why Advent is more crucial than ever. Maybe that’s why I need to hear this story again, the story we’ve all heard a hundred times before, the story of a little baby born in the smallest of places to the people who the system says do not matter. It lets us hear, once again, how God works…which is not how we work…and to engage our hope once again, for we must have that if we are to really say, with all our hearts, that it doesn’t have to be this way. Advent gives us the space to engage our imaginations, to picture a world that is not yet here as we engage with the world which is here.

There is no singular event that will transform the world in a moment, no superman to fly down and change the course of history. There is, though, a God of presence, who is with us all as we step forward, asking us to seek the ways of the kin-dom, to do the things that make for life, to seek the good and the right, and to love in this world the best we can, where we are, with what we have. With God, our wholeness, our integrity, our salvation is a two-way street, it requires our participation. We have to pay attention to see things changing, for they won’t come in an instant, they’ll be born somewhere small, in a stable in the back, for we don’t make room in the main halls.

The baby is born, we say again this year, but Christ must be born again in our hearts, for if Christ stays an icon in a nativity scene, then we can take refugees like he was, lock them in cages and call it justice. But when he is born in our hearts, then we’re rooted in something deeper, knowing that we are connected one to the other, that our borders don’t matter as much as our shared humanity, and that God’s Love is for all people…

every – single – other.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Deuteronomy 26:1-11 & Philippians 4:1-13

This is a story from the poet, Naomi Shihab Nye:
After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.
Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this.
I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—
she stopped crying.
She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,
Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her—Southwest.
She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.
Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends.
Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.
She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.
She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same
powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African-American, one Mexican-American—ran around serving us all apple juice and lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.
And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—
had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,
with green furry leaves.
Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant.
Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
this is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—has seemed apprehensive about any other person.
They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.
Not everything is lost.

Welcome to the week of gratitude. We’re meant to squeeze it all into one far too large meal on Thursday, though there are plenty of suggestions, both is scripture and beyond, that we might ought to seek the path of gratitude as a regular habit, even as faithful practice. Gratitude can be a very powerful mood altering drug. It can be a paradigm-shifter, a worldview-altering game changer. Don’t believe me? Well, let’s just take the last week and do some reframing. Doesn’t it help, after all, that in the midst of some incredibly draconian immigration policies that we can still be grateful for people willing to help, and for a court system that refuses to punish someone for giving hungry people food? Doesn’t it help, as the iron grip of racism on our nation’s history gets exposed again and again, to be thankful for those doing the exposing and the myriad of small signs – in books and media representation and voices being raised — that people’s vision is changing? Doesn’t it help, as we all wrestle with the heavy weight of an impeachment investigation, to gratefully witness the testimony of courageous women and men – particularly women – who place country over party, and virtue over politics?

Gratitude shapes us. Gratitude does not ever ask us to ignore injustice or to numb pain or suffering, rather it allows us to work within those oppressions, things that can easily shut us down and imprison us. Being grateful for what we can, where we are, can help us not only see what is right around us, and appreciate the tools and gifts we have at hand, it opens up the world of possibility, allowing us a chance to see that in the worst of times, it’s not all bad. The practice of looking for something to be grateful for builds in us a capacity, it generates memories that we can take with us into the next challenges we might face.

But the reason I really want to suggest the power of gratitude to you today is not because it’s topical, or “’tis the season,” or because I’m going to, at any point EVER, say “attitude of gratitude.” It’s because gratitude is subversive. And, especially right now, the church ought to be all about being subversive…which we can do, I’m sad to report, by simply being the church.

Paul’s words to a small church community in modern day Greece, a place called Philippi, ought to echo in our ears – “…beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” There’s clearly some conflict in this little church, something that has to do with leadership and maybe some miscommunication. I know, hard to imagine in church, but I guess it did happen before we solved all of that. What is compelling is that Paul doesn’t shy away from the conflict, nor does he gloss it over. He mentions it openly, because it involves two human beings and Paul seems to think that love has to be more than a tag line. Paul reminds this church that when things seem complicated and ambivalent that they should seek the truth, which always takes humility, to focus on the just, which requires some gratitude, to look on that which is honorable and worthy, on things that are authentic and compelling. Though he meant it for a community long ago in a very different place, we can be grateful for these words, for they lift up values that are just as crucial for us today…they stand in stark contrast to the cultural values we see around us, values like “might makes right,” “anything is OK as long as it makes money,” or “that’s just boys being boys.”

Paul rounds this claim of values out with a portion of his own story – a story of being content with what he has, of knowing what it is to have little and what it is to have plenty. In other words, a story of gratitude that he offers to a church that is worried, perhaps about a perceived lack, for this is often the cause of conflict and fear. Paul counters that with gratitude, because gratitude, I think Paul knows, leans into abundance, even in the appearance of scarcity. Gratitude helps us to seek out the places in our lives where there is something, even the smallest of things, because sometimes that is exactly where God resides – in the smallest, quietest thing. And, we ought to notice, it feeds our sense of humility, perhaps one of the most important spiritual attributes. For it is hard to be grateful if you feel entitled, and hard not to feel entitled if you cannot see how very little we create for ourselves. We are interconnected, all of us dependent on one another and God’s Grace to guide us through a world full of challenges.

Practicing gratitude develops in us a memory for such spiritual effort. It helps us to remember, in the tough times, previous tough times that we are now past. Such memory helps not only us to get through the new stuff, but also, hopefully, grants us some sympathy for others who are having tough times. The Deuteronomy passage is exactly this kind of work, instructing faithful Hebrews to remember this story – “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.” This is a story of gratitude for God’s work in the world, a story of faith in the longer arc of the universe which we affirm is bending towards justice, even when we can’t see the curvature at all.

This is what we faithfully reproduce when we come to the table to share the tiny morsel that paradoxically signals God’s abundance…it’s what we nurture when we light a candle at the beginning of each service, bringing the light of Christ in with us and then taking it back out into the world at the end of service…it’s why we come to service at all, I think, which is more than just holy habit, but rather a chance to encounter one another again, to hear words spoken and sung that lift up new possibilities and to have a moment, just a moment, where the life of the kin-dom is set before us, wrapped in the stories from our past…stories of hope, of justice and of peace.

Gratitude is why we come to hear these same stories again and again and again. We’ll start Advent next Sunday as we work our way towards Christmas and we’ll hear again the story of a baby born, a story with absolutely ZERO surprises…and a story we need to hear again. For each time we hear our stories, the stories that give us identity, there is a chance to embrace them with humility and gratitude, listening for unheard voices and different angles, for we never have the complete story…there’s ALWAYS something more to be told, always another voice to add to the narrative, shaping how we hear and who we are because of it.

As we celebrate this week of Thanksgiving, it is a special time for us to remember our own past and the stories that inform it. For many of us, those stories must be re-told, mixed with courageous honesty and some contrition, but we ought to endeavor in that work nonetheless, for deep, sincere soul-searching is critically needed…especially during the times in which we might honestly and profoundly wonder – who are we?

This is a very good time – through story and tradition – to remember that we have much to be grateful for, most of all God’s abundant Love. But here’s a warning for your Thanksgiving gratitude: The counting of your blessings has the chance to disrupt a narrative of individualism… it might possibly interrupt a carefully constructed sense of isolation…it could turn us from selfishness, whose opposite is not selflessness, but rather is compassion, connection and mutuality, which would build an entirely different kind of world, right? Wouldn’t that be something to be grateful for?

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Isaiah 12 & Isaiah 65:17-25

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done…your kin-dom come, your will be done…

on earth as it is in heaven. We say these words every single Sunday here, and many other churches, if not most of them, say them, too. Like Isaiah’s words of comfort and challenge from thousands of years ago, these are words of tension, prayers of what is not visible or known, but what could be.

What could be would fill up an entire Bible…and more.

On Thursday Scott and I closed up the office, drove up to the Dream Center and delivered the boxes and boxes of hygiene items that you all brought specifically to help those released from prison in this long overdue effort to reform our so-called “justice” system. At least some of those freed will come back to Tulsa, and we know that while their sentences have been commuted, the impact of years in prison, the fines and fees they’re still saddled with and the weight of a felony conviction will still hang on their necks like a millstone. So, it’s a small gesture to give them some of the supplies they might need, a sense of connection and community. It’s a vision of what could be, even as we wrestle with what is.

That’s what the church does, at least at its best. We address the “what is” and imagine the “what could be” as we learn together a biblical tradition and a gospel story that bears no illusions about the things that make us feel fearful and anxious all the time, while emphatically stating, over and over again, “do not fear.” Part of our task as the church is to bear forth this imagery, language and theology for a God who we cannot see and bring that stuff to life through people, who we can see. It is to dream, to dream BIG, and then to live that dream, even when we cannot see it at all. We call that faith.

These two sections of Isaiah represent a broad section of Jewish history. Isaiah, you see, is pieced together from a long tradition, rather than written all at once. Chapter 12, what scholars call “Second Isaiah,” was written down somewhere around 750 years before Jesus, and is mostly contained in Isaiah chapters 40-55, but also present here in 12. “Trito” or “Third Isaiah,” located in chapter 65, amongst other places, was written some 200 years later around 530 BCE. They represent an entire collection of writings from this prophet, or people speaking in his name, and they offer these words of comfort and affliction to generations. It is a time of hope, to be sure, but, Isaiah reminds them, in words that echo through the centuries, it is also a time to hold deep awareness of how things can go bad in a hurry. The imagery of wolves lying down with lambs, of plentiful crops and easy work…these are dreams born of knowing the inverse, dreams that you have when you are scraping by, when there’s nothing to eat and the wolves are at your door.

Hard times, Isaiah laments. These are hard times. But the hard times are coming to an end, and the world will be better – justice will be present, hope will be abundant and suffering will be no more. All of this is coming, though it’s not here yet, and it still isn’t.

In fact, this might be one of the most challenging parts of faith, for while it’s good to read these ancient writings and understand that “hard times” are ubiquitous with being human, it may also make us feel like we are being asked in each and every generation to live for what isn’t here yet. And like waiting on a bus in the rain or for that clock to indicate quitting time, we could understandably ask ourselves – when does it get here?

What Isaiah reminds us is that faith is something more than the realization. It is made, it is forged in the waiting. As we sing those dreams out loud, the other part of faithful living is that we should live like it isalready here, like justice ought to be expected, hope commonplace and suffering intolerable. Because living like that isn’t pollyanna positive thinking, it is a strategy…one that changes the world around us, by first shaping our hearts and then framing the way that we live. It’s what’s called a corollary argument – the second part of the statement is affirmed by the first. If the stressful times are coming to an end, and we can feel relief and comfort because of that, then the stressful times are already beginning to go away.

Isaiah’s words were so powerful, so effective in their evocation of this glorious time to come, that they were picked up again during another round of hard times, reinterpreted by the followers of Jesus and the early church, so much so that many Christians today think they were written to predict Christ, when they were actually written to predict hope in the time they originally served. Like good literature those words echo across time and space allow us to return to them. We can re-imagine, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” or “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board,” or even “Mr and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much”, for they are words that let us feel that hope again. And whether it’s Zora Neal Hurston, Dickens, J.K. Rowling’s long and troublesome adventures of a certain Mr. Potter, or the story of Jesus for that matter, such hope rekindles in us each time because we need it to.

We could certainly view the news of the past week…the last month…the last year…maybe even the whole of our lives as chaotic and anxiety producing. We can absorb data on gun deaths, domestic violence, homelessness, drug addiction, poverty, racism, human trafficking, on and on and on…and sink into a deeper and deeper hole. We could accept the assertion that this is just “how it is” and settle into protecting ourselves, isolating into a world of individualism. We could accept, to use the metaphor of Isaiah, that the temple is being rebuilt just for us and we can retreat behind its walls, shutting out those who scare or offend us and then we’ll find, just as Isaiah is warning, that we’ll have recreated the situation that tore down the first temple. Instead we have to step out in trust, and rely on the tools that have been given to us – love your neighbor, pray for those who persecute you, accept that the kin-dom of God is all around us right now.

So, we sing songs like, “Christ Will Come Again,” we lift up an age to come that will be different than now and our liturgy imagines a time of peace and justice. And, I think I know what you’re thinking because I’m thinking it too – that’s a lovely sentiment, but did you see the news? Another school shooting, Venice underwater, Australia on fire (just after California got put out), Hong Kong under virtual martial law, the horrific realization of how deeply cruel this administration’s policy on immigration has been, and an impeachment trial that reveals how deeply separated we are in our country. And death has held a particularly hard grip on this community lately – many in the circles close to us passing on, with the concurrent weight that we feel when death takes its toll. The kin-dom is all around us, pastor? Where, exactly?

Soon we will begin the Advent season, working our way towards Christmas, always celebrated with singing and celebration! And before that, we will have Thanksgiving. So, gratitude and praise will fill the next few weeks, which could seem quite in opposition to the general malaise I just described. Towards the end of the passage from the 12^th chapter of Isaiah, our first reading today, there’s suddenly a psalm. Not all of the psalms are contained in the book of Psalms, you know. It says:

Sing praises to God, for God has done gloriously;

let this be known in all the earth.

Apparently, Second Isaiah added these passages of good news to the existing canon of Isaiah so that the exiled in Babylon could fan the embers of their dormant faith into flame, if there were even embers. For most of those exiled for generations in a foreign land, the fire of faith had gone completely out. So, the prophet’s task was to preach something so clear – to blast a note so loud – that faith could be actually re-ignited, reborn in the hearts of a people whose faith had died.

As we witness the things that we are witnessing in the world around us, and contend with the tension and anxiety they bring, it can be quite easy to lose faith. Frankly, I sometimes have little left to argue for it, and find myself more often agreeing with those who are abandoning their hope and seeking to find some other means of coping. It’s completely understandable and, for me at least, also completely insufficient. None of those other coping mechanisms help me as well. I can’t find something other than faith to really carry me the way I need to be carried. I keep coming back to it because nothing seems as real to me as the mysterious, unknowable, unseen thing that we call God.

This is what binds us together as church, the living out of our faith. It’s why it’s hard to be a follower of Jesus in isolation, we need each other so that when some of us have faith as dim as a dying ember, others can fan the flame…when some of us have nothing but tears, others can be a shoulder to lean on, an ear to hear, a voice to offer sympathy…and when some of us can only hum the hymn softly, with little song left in our hearts, others can sing boldly.

The truth is, I cannot tell you how we will contend with the many issues we face as human beings on this planet – most of them self-inflicted. I cannot convey to you how the wounds will be healed, the pain will stop, the seemingly irreparable will be repaired. I can’t point out the kin-dom to you, at least not in doses big enough to matter in this sea of struggle. But I trust it’s there, all around us…and we are here to remind each other of God’s Love in that chaos…we are to prompt one another – do not fear, God is our salvation – not the next election cycle – and we should not fear, not the overdue bill, not the anxiety of what might happen, not even the death of someone we love deeply. Christ will come again we sing, and I believe that. I trust in it. I also expect it won’t be in the way we expect. It will come in the re-imagining of story, the re-purposing of hope, the re-living of a life of faith. God IS our salvation…our strength and our might…and with joy we will draw water from that well once more. The well that never runs dry.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Luke 20:27-38

Jesus is having an argument.

It’s not the first time, nor will it be the last, for in matters of faith we seem to need to know who is right…and perhaps more importantly, who is wrong. This is a particularly wonky argument, too – it’s all about resurrection and afterlife, with a complicated riddle thrown in about whose marriage to whom really counts.

– SIDE NOTE – it really should be mentioned, since it might be glossed over from LOTS of pulpits speaking to this passage, that here’s a great example of Biblical marriage rules. Please notice that the religious authorities bring up what is called the “levirate marriage law.” It states that if a couple marries and the husband dies before they have children, then his brother is obligated to not only marry his sister-in-law, but also to impregnate her – the children then belonging to his brother’s line of inheritance. So, think about that when someone claims they want Biblical family values!!

OK, back to the main point – we have a theological debate here, and a scriptural one, too. I think it’s equally interesting for us to know that within this question from the accusers trying to “catch” Jesus are a lot of assumptions that we don’t necessarily get. Assumption one – what constitutes scripture? The Sadducees believe that the Torah, what we’d call the first five books of our Bible, is the only scriptural authority. For the Pharisees and for Jesus, that authority is expanded. Jesus seems to favor Isaiah as very authoritative, something that the Sadducees see as very suspect. So, even then, there were arguments about the authority of written words.

Assumption two – God is still speaking. We say this as a slogan in the United Church of Christ, one that has been seen as controversial at times. But here we are in one of the gospels with Jesus making the same claim to a group that believes all God needs to say is trapped in 5 books written hundreds of years ago. And Jesus is disputing that claim.

Assumption three – there is life beyond this life. That one may not seem so controversial, though there are those today who say we are born, we live and then we die and that’s it. The Sadducees do not profess anything like heaven or an afterlife, they say that we live on in our family lines, in the identities we create here in this world…which is why you have to have a law like levirate marriage. If you die and have no heirs, then you are really dead. If you have someone to carry on your name, then you’re only mostly dead. And, as Miracle Max has taught us, “There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.” And that’s really the point, isn’t it? Life is that which defines meaning to us, and outside of that framework we don’t have much on which to hang our hats. Some sense of life – even life beyond life – helps to soften that existential angst with which we all live.

See, this is more than just a gotcha moment where religious authorities are trying to catch Jesus in a theological mistake. This is actually a serious debate on the reality of life and the tension of our mortality. And Jesus doesn’t want to steal the Sadducees sense of peace, nor ours for that matter, he wants to expand it.

On Friday three churches gathered together – All Souls, Morningstar Baptist and Fellowship – for a profoundly meaningful ceremony collecting sacred ground to be sanctified in memory of a victim of racial justice. We dug in soil that was in the general vicinity of the home that a Mrs. Rosa Morrison resided in with her husband and 12 year-old son, until she was murdered in the 1921 attack on Greenwood. For some gathered it was an abstract, symbolic moment, but for others it was visceral and tangible, a very real part of their lives, even today. It was a claim on life as well. We stood there in a small circle and sang “Amazing Grace” and remembered a life, which is one way that Mrs. Morrison has not just ceased to exist. And there are other ways, for the undercurrent of our gathering was that this life is not the final answer. Mrs. Morrison did not know justice in this world, and maybe that’s not possible anymore. But I don’t know what comes next, and neither do you. And I think that we choose to trust that there is something larger than what we experience in this life – peace and equity and justice live somewhere, and maybe we will, too, someday.

At this point in Luke’s gospel, Jesus is spending ample time arguing with different religious authorities that they are getting the Kingdom of the world confused with the Kin-dom of God. While they quibble over who will be married to whom in some complicated scheme, he is talking about things of ultimate importance and trying to lay a moral foundation for his followers that will be resilient and vibrant. And he is doing this a couple of weeks before resurrection will be more than a theological debate.

Soon the disciples will be faced with this question head-on…and they are unprepared. It will knock them off all their moorings and set them adrift in a sea of chaos and confusion. And they will have to contend with the fact that Jesus is gone…and the fact that he isn’t. It will no longer be theoretical, it will be tangible, visceral and real…and it will be confusing and disorienting…for this life matters, and life beyond this life matters, too. Our bodies matter, our names matter, our histories matter. That’s why we lift those names up, especially when they have been brushed under the carpet of history, forgotten or ignored. This question of who we are – of our identity in the biggest sense of that word – is one of profound importance. Particularly in the face of death it becomes even more profound.

AND – more than our bodies must matter, for we are not only this stuff. Part of our faithful affirmation is that God is the God of more than our limitations, more than our fragile bodies and our finite understanding, for God exists beyond such things, and sometimes it is in that beyond where we will find our justice, our healing, our wholeness.

I know that there are many of us who are going to fight like hell for the memory of people like Mrs. Morrison. We’re going to fight systems of injustice and racism, we’re going to work for reparations and restoration, we’re going to seek justice in as many ways as it can be sought. AND, ultimately, I don’t know if we will see that justice in this world, in our time.

What I trust is that there is another existence, the one that Jesus lifts up, where our relationships are different, where love that we have fostered and nurtured and maintained doesn’t fade but is strengthened by a more complete Love. That’s what I think resurrection is all about. It is about wholeness, something more than just the immortality of a “soul,” which we all probably confess think possesses our best traits and highest ideals, but isn’t all of us. It’s our soul, after all, not our fractured bones and broken hearts, right? Not the worst thing that has ever happened to us, or our wounds and scars, our too high blood sugar, our depression and our most secret anxieties are left behind – the soul is just the good stuff, right?

But that’s not wholeness. At some point we are all reconciled to God – ALL of us, like every single one of us and the totality of who we each are, warts and all. That’s why resurrection is so important to me. It ultimately is not a discussion about what happens to us after we die, or whether heaven exists, or if the streets are gold or platinum there…it’s a matter of the ultimate justice of the world. If you believe that this world is all there is, that any justice you receive will have to be in the here and now, you might be pretty bleak. After all, injustice surrounds us, it absolutely saturates our world. It takes some serious theological gymnastics to maintain hope in such circumstances, for death seems to be ever present, and it seems like its winning.

So that’s when I remember this complicated answer from Jesus about angels and marriage and worthiness and resurrection, which is all just a set-up in my opinion so he can say, “God is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to God all of them are alive.” He tells them that their question involves people who “belong to this age.” That word being translated here as “age”, is more often translated as “world” in the New Testament. It is “aeon” and it does mean a period of time, not this big, blue marble we call earth. So, Jesus is setting up a struggle of values here – the values of his place and time and the values of the Kin-dom.

The Sadducees’ question involves the complexities of levirate marriage, which is a patriarchal institution seeking to masquerade as justice. It protected women by passing them from male to male, making their ability to reproduce their only value. And Jesus says that in the aeon to come, the whole institution of marriage will be unnecessary, which isn’t a dig against marriage, it’s a pushback against this “solution” to the vulnerability of women. The values of the resurrection life don’t pass women along as property, they don’t even create the scenario in the first place that would ask for such a “solution” to present itself. There is something better.

What if I told you that the best love you know, the most perfect relationship you have, is not all there is? What if I said that whatever justice we can know in this life is partial, and true justice only fully materializes in a life to come? Would those be comforting statements to you? Would it be inspiring or deflating to know that we see now through a glass, but dimly, as the Apostle Paul once wrote, but in the age to come, in the eternal life of God’s presence, all of that which we have felt most peaceful, most nurturing, most protective, most loving…all of that will be supplanted by something even more complete, more whole, more holy?

The promise of resurrection tells us this – death isn’t a thing. Of course we know that it is, we feel it and know it, more poignantly here with the loss of two special members of our own community in recent days. But the faithful promise remains – just as elusive and amazing as the days in which the disciples experienced Jesus again – death is not the final answer, nor is limitation, or injustice or pain. For our God is not the God of the dead…to God nothing is truly dead. To God ALL are alive!

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Luke 19:1-10 & Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4

It’s awfully convenient, don’t you think? I mean Zacchaeus just happens to be in the right tree and the right time, guessing correctly which way the parade is going to turn, and Jesus just happens to look up right then to see him in the tree. Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, do we even know that Jesus’ eyesight was that good?

Rev. Dr. Alyce M. McKenzie, Professor of Preaching and Worship at Perkins School of Theology, points out that throughout the gospel of Luke, Jesus seems to be passing by at just the right time for people. Just when a man is twisted by demons (4:31, 8:26), Jesus the exorcist passes by. Just as men are involved in the daily grind of making a living, Jesus passes by and calls them to follow him (chap. 5). Just as a centurion’s servant falls ill, Jesus happens to be in town (chap. 7). Just as someone reaches the end of her suffering rope, after years of struggle, Jesus happens to be moving down the street (8:41). Just when someone thinks they are beyond the notice and reach of a loving, forgiving God, Jesus the Good Shepherd, the Forgiving Parent, sets comes along with a parable (15:1, 15:11). And just when a short, insecure extortionist is primed for repentance, guess who is passing through Jericho?

See, Zacchaeus is a tax collector. Tax collectors have featured heavily in the lectionary recently, indicating something in the gospels which is kept on the DL in most churches…money matters to Jesus. Not in a prosperity gospel, “Jesus wants to make you rich” kind of way, but as a moral claim on our lives. Jesus cares about what we do with our money, in part because money is power – even in first century Palestine – and Jesus REALLY cares about what we do with our power.

The tax collector is the stereotypical example of what NOT to do with money or power in Jesus’ time. Tax collection was a major part of the imperial model, it’s how Rome kept things going. And the best way to squeeze the most money out of the locals, insuring that Rome’s tribute was regular and sizable, was to get a local to do it. They know the people, they know who has the money, and they have the connections already. The problem with that is, you have to find someone willing to sell out their own people for a profit. And, fortunately for Rome, there’s always someone willing to do that.

So, Zacchaeus’ job was to shake people down for the tax money, and he was apparently good at it. He gathered all that he could and whatever he gathered over the tax amount was his to keep. So the harder he shook, the more he made. And Zacchaeus, the text tells us, was rich…but not popular.

There’s a whole sermon about economic injustice, the gaming of systems to keep the poor down and the ways that such systems don’t really change, they just change outfits. But that’s not the sermon for today. For the more I tried to write that one, the more the Spirit told me to remind us all of the presence of God in Jesus at the right time, in the right place. The more I wanted to decry the injustice, the more God wanted me to say, pay attention – it’s not coincidence, this meeting between Jesus and Zacchaeus.

Zacchaeus may have been wealthy, but he had no joy. He may have had power, but he wasn’t whole. He had slowly become self-aware enough to know that the very thing from which he profited was eating away at his soul, for he was damaged, too, by the same system that exploited and oppressed others. Racism, sexism, homophobia, all of the oppressive systems we have in place damage us all – certainly those targeted by those systems first and foremost, but they damage even the perpetrators, for they are evil, and they break us down like an infection, wounded hearts and weakening souls. Zacchaeus was lost, and would have been seen as such by everyone around him. And yet, Jesus comes to seek out and save the lost.

This salvation will not be easy for Zacchaeus. Think of what’s going to happen when Zacchaeus does what he says he’s going to do – give away half his possessions and, perhaps most importantly, paying out reparations to those he has swindled. He’ll disrupt the whole process. That’s actually the point of reparations – to disrupt the injustice. His actions will alert the authorities that want the status quo. He’ll be rejected, if not persecuted, by them. His whole life will change. And, personally, I Jesus I think had been looking for someone like this – someone within the system who would reject the system…someone who benefits from injustice to stand up and say, “No more. It ends with me.”

The prophet Habakkuk raises the same kind of incredible proposition…that in the midst of turmoil and injustice, God is working. The terrible things that we see around us are not forever, they have a finitude – they are coming to an end. Habakkuk also makes another claim – evil is real, it is unexplainable with logic and it seeps into everything around us, maybe even us. But there is a hope that is found in living faithfully, in trusting in a vision that you cannot yet see, in finding hope in our dependence on God’s power and wisdom. There is hope in knowing that God finds us in our suffering and enables us to move beyond it. And that hope, the prophet says, ought to be written so large that you could read it even if you were running past as fast as you could run…it isn’t, but it ought to be.

While it might be tempting to think of ourselves as just characters in a play whose plot is already established, I’m eager to report to us all that it’s far more complex than that. This is a relationship of ultimate proportions, this dance between humanity and divinity, one that cannot be so easily defined as “fate.” We, too, are bound up in systems like we see in these stories from scripture, systems of our own making, though we didn’t make them…systems that we benefit from, though we may not have intention or effort to do so…systems that encourage us to place our dependence on something other than the Love and Grace of God. It may, at times, feel like we’re lost in those systems, unable to even see them, much less escape them. But the Human One has come to seek out and to save the lost, perhaps by showing us that we’re not lost at all…we’re precisely where we’re supposed to be.

What if we are here, right here in this place we call Fellowship Church, surrounded by this cloud of witnesses, these saints we remember today, supported by the past which has laid a foundation, a church that has bucked the trend on many issues, belonging to a denomination that has bucked the trend as well. And now we’re being invited by God to be a holy disruption in the systems around us today…welcoming people who the church has rejected, making claim on the human rights of people to seek asylum and refuge, to have healthcare, including a woman’s rights to the care of her own body, and education? What if we are being invited with our own lives and actions to change the narrative, to use our power, and, yes, even our money, as a worldly means to achieve God’s good ends, even when that means putting our own comfort and wealth at risk, thereby disrupting the evil systems that keep the people of God oppressed and disenfranchised?

What if whatever issues we face — whatever issues YOU face – are not as much problems as they are opportunities, a divine “coincidence” that gives us a chance to see a different way of being – written so large that it’s hard to believe we didn’t see it before.

What if it’s no coincidence that we are where we are…when we are. Maybe it’s a voice calling us all down out of our own tree, inviting us to salvation?

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Luke 18:9-14 (NRSV + a paraphrased dramatic reading from Liturgy for the Whole Church, by Susan K. Bock)

I was driving to the church the other day and I pulled up behind a big, white, “dually” pickup. On the back bumper was a sticker that said… “If we armed babies, they wouldn’t get aborted.” My first reaction was, of course, huh? Then I thought, you know, setting aside the problems of cognitive development, hand-eye coordination and fine motor control, the sheer logistics of this proposition were stunning. I mean, how do we get the gun to the baby? The options are all gross. And that’s when it happened…I found myself saying something to the effect of, “Thank God I’m not like that guy.”

This parable, which exists only in Luke, is more than just a common parabolic reversal, where the expected “good guy” becomes the “bad guy.” It is a reversal-reversal-reversal, a hall of mirrors where you’re never sure where your reflection is coming from. The “simple” and most common interpretation goes like this – you should be humble and repentant like the tax collector, not like that terrible pharisee. Right away you’ve done what I did with my super-judgy attitude at that streetlight, you’ve become the pharisee in disparaging the pharisee. It’s like hating hate, it doesn’t resolve anything. Plus, I would argue, it puts us right back in the game that the pharisee is playing. Oh, NOW I get it God, we should earn Your Grace by being humble…got it! Just watch, I’m going to be the best humble person EVER! No one ever in the history of the world has been as good at humility as me!! Really, everyone says so…super humble, this guy.

In order to make some sense beyond that over simplistic interpretation, we need to know that both of these characters are odd to a first century reader. A tax collector being in a temple is like the CEO of Chik-fil-a catering a drag show…the pieces don’t fit together. Tax collecting was one of the occupations outright forbidden to Jews by religious law. Tax collectors were viewed as ritually unclean, dishonest, and in cahoots with the Roman authority that exploited the people, largely through taxation. Why would that guy would step in a temple?

But the pharisee would be seen as odd, too. Note the details – he prays to himself, isolated and proud, maybe raising his arms and generally making a spectacle of himself. The Pharisaic way of life was not based on the disparagement of others, nor does it hold some theology of “earning” your way to righteousness. That’s why what this pharisee says would have been strange, not stereotypical. When we equate hypocritical, self-righteous religion with a sect of Judaism as a whole, we do disservice to that history and stir up the most vile of anti-semitism, something we ought to pay close attention to one the anniversary of the shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue, the home of rabbinic Judaism, which comes directly from the Pharisaic practice. The listeners of Jesus’ day would have expected the Pharisee to be a careful observer of the Law, in keeping with their generally high view of the Pharisaic movement, but would also have cringed at his self-righteousness. The parable serves up two behaviors that are out of character: a Pharisee praying in a self-righteous manner, and a tax collector who prays at all!

But the point of the parable is not “arrogance bad, humility good.” It is ultimately for us to trust that we are forgiven, to accept divine Grace, to acknowledge our shortcomings, the places we’ve missed the mark, our sin and move into the acceptance of being blessed, so we might be a blessing to others, for the final gift of Grace is to allow us to be gracious, and we certainly can’t do that if we are arrogant like the Pharisee. But, neither can we do it if we remain habitually mired in a sense of our unworthiness.

It seems pretty obvious to me that Luke’s purpose for this parable was to challenge self-righteousness and to promote humility. Look at what he writes to introduce the parable –
“He told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt” (18:9). Humility is a good thing. In fact, I happen to believe that it is a crucial thing, especially right now. But humility is not self-deprecation, nor is it self-abuse. It isn’t a chance to degrade yourself or publicly shame your way to happiness, which is not an equation that works. Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less.

I know that was not my first instinct at that stoplight. I was sure – I might still be sure – that I’m TONS better than that guy because of his bumper-sticker ideology. My response, the assumptions that I made, the rank I assigned him immediately — hell, I’m not even sure it was a him – reveals something about where my heart is and what I’m doing to contribute to the kin-dom. Because I’m still convinced that I’m “right”, that his position is untenable and pointless and represents the ridiculousness with which we talk about issues that are critical to our social fabric. And it’s not a matter of me being wrong about that, it’s more a matter of it’s application.

One of the great distinctions between the pharisee and the tax collector is the pharisee’s certainty, balanced by the tax collector’s surrender. The pharisee knows how God works and is working that system, even wielding it against others like a weapon. It’s like the tax collector is stuck on the question, never mind the answer. He is driven to this prayer because he has no other place to go, any wisdom or answer he already has seems insufficient. And neither way is the road to God. There are times when we need the certainty of God’s ways of inclusion and justice, to welcome in those who have been cast out, to protect them from a world that actively seeks to exclude, to stand for justice in the grayness of human experience. And we need to be certain of those convictions. There are also times – probably more times, to be fair – that we don’t have the answer, or our answer is incomplete or situational and we need to be able to sit with that, and appreciate how it shapes us.

That word humility is “Tapeinoo (tah-pah-nah-o)” in Greek, and it means to level, to be modest, to assign a lower rank to. It is not shaming or self-flagellation, it is that feeling you get when you are out late, away from the light pollution of the city, and you can look up and see a million stars spread out across the night sky. It’s a feeling of significant insignificance. You matter more because you matter less. You are part of something bigger than just you, and, suddenly, the world is no longer dependent on you to stay in orbit. Morality is no longer a sheltered puppy waiting for you to rescue it, but a living, breathing force that will make itself known. So, you are now freed to do other things, like speaking to a moral position, and also showing compassion, giving away the grace given to us, and learning how to be loving in a world that sees love as a transaction.

What if we really lived like that? I mean, what if there was no ladder to climb, no mark to meet? What if there were just heartstrings, divine heartstrings…holding on tight. What if there were no sinners, and no saints, either? Just the beloved of God, being carried home to the heart of God where we belong?

That would change the world. I’m not sure we could handle it.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Genesis 32:22-31

Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.

This is the night before Jacob is to meet his brother, Esau, for the first time in twenty years. They’ve been apart for so long because of Jacob. See, the bigger context of this story is that Jacob cheated his brother – there’s really no other way to say it – taking all of his inheritance and fleeing to another country. It’s not exactly a good way to foster a good relationship with one’s sibling. 20 years ago, Esau wanted to kill Jacob, and for all Jacob knows at this moment, he still wants to kill him. Such an assumption, frankly, has as much to say about Jacob as it does about Esau. Jacob seems to know he’s not been very good to his brother. If he had no self-awareness at all, he’d march right up to Esau, wondering what in the world was the problem. Butin the paragraphs just before what was read this morning, Jacob has learned that Esau is on his way to meet him… along with four hundred men! It does not sound like the makings of a happy reunion, and Jacob is terrified.

So Jacob sends a gift ahead to his brother via a messenger, in the hopes that he can appease his assumed wrath, and then he sends his family, his close servants, everyone else from his traveling group ahead of him and he is alone at the side of the stream. This is perhaps the first time in the story of Jacob from Genesis that he is this vulnerable, largely because he always avoids his vulnerability, cheating his way around it, stealing what he think he needs for protection and security and avoiding the things that make him vulnerable in the first place. But not this time. This night he stays in this vulnerable place, facing it for perhaps the first time, and that’s when he encounters this “man” and wrestles with him throughout the night.

The Hebrew in Genesis is quite clear, this is an ish, the word for man. But when the prophet Hosea, later in the Bible, recounts this story, in verse 4 of chapter 12, it says, “He [Jacob] strove with the angel and prevailed, he wept and sought his favor…” Somewhere in the imaginings of the Hebrew writers and thinkers, this ish becomes a malak, which means messenger – traditionally the role of and name for what we call in English an “angel.” But the pronoun usage in the text makes it hard to decipher who is speaking and what action is really going on, leaving plenty of room in this story for a more modern psychological interpretation, Jacob wrestling with himself through the night…facing his past and his transgressions and his vulnerability directly.

Whomever Jacob’s sparring partner is, he does not leave the melee unscathed. For the rest of his life, Jacob will limp. He will feel every front that moves through Israel, he’ll wake up each morning and take while to “warm up,” he’ll get to heaven and be disappointed that if he’d only been born a couple thousand years later he’d have had access to ibuprofen. And he will be doubly marked, for he not only has his limp, his “blessing” comes in the form of a name change, a very common ancient narrative tool that signifies transformation. For if this sparring match is about anything, it is about identity. Jacob’s name means “trickster” or “grabs at the heel,” a direct reference to this twin born grabbing his brother Esau’s heel, even at birth taking advantage of others for his own gain. The angel changes it to “Israel,” which means “God-wrestler.”

Jacob has defined himself through acquisition by any means necessary up to this point, but something about this impending encounter is too big for his standard operating procedure and he knows it. His anxiety is driven by his awareness that what he has been up to now may not be enough for what is to come. He won’t be able to avoid this interaction, he won’t be able to trick his way out or walk briskly away in the other direction. So, he engages, placing a half-nelson on his self-revelation, refusing to let go until he finds something worthwhile. The ambiguity of the text seems purposeful, as if when we do our wrestling with ourselves, we are also struggling with God. And, the story tells us, it’s the struggle that delivers the blessing. Sometimes we have to be stubborn, to resist, to refuse to let go in order to find our benefit.

This weekend the annual meeting of the UCC churches in Kansas and Oklahoma was held – our conference meeting. Many of you were there and I hope you experienced some of what it means to be together as a larger church, though not much larger of a church. One of the harsh realities that our conference minister spoke to was our size. We are now 56 churches spread out over two states, with a church in Kansas City closing at the end of the year. So we’ll be 55. And our conference minister, Dr. Edith Guffey, told us that she lists 17 more as endangered. So, we’ll likely be a lot smaller in the next 10 years.

Now we could try and avoid that anxiety, running away from the news, burying our heads in the sand and doing the same stuff over and over again, hoping for a different outcome. Or, like Jacob, we could see that while our past may have delivered us much, it is not the deliverer of our future. For that we must struggle, and wrestle – with God and each other, we must claim the promise of church, in the truest sense of that hope, and refuse to let go until it blesses us.

Jacob, Genesis tells us, is not a good person. Throughout Genesis, he cons, cheats, deceives, and manipulates his way into his personal blessings. He steals his inheritance from his brother, the rightful heir, exploiting his father’s blindness and Esau’s gullibility. At almost every turn, however, Jacob’s transgressions seem to grant him only more wealth, more success. How is it that this person is the one in whom we invest such spiritual meaning – the one who is called the father of the great nation of Israel, the one who is actually renamed Israel…for, the angel says, “you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed?” But let us note something else, too…something you didn’t get to hear in the lectionary cut this morning. Jacob doesn’t just come expecting forgiveness from his brother. He comes with two hundred female goats and twenty male goats, two hundred ewes and twenty rams, thirty milch camels and their colts, forty cows and ten bulls, twenty female donkeys and ten male donkeys. In other words, he comes with reparations for his brother – some concrete way to repair that broken relationship.

We, too, as a church have a blemished past. We have, even in the so-called progressive world of the UCC, bought into the lie of white supremacy, we have colonialism and cultural appropriation in our past. We have with narrow vision claimed the doctrine of “All Lives Matter,” blinding ourselves to the injustice that makes “Black Lives Matter” a crucial necessity for any kind of justice. We can celebrate the first openly gay man being ordained in 1974, but must also acknowledge that he was never given a pulpit in the same denomination that ordained him. We can claim victories in the civil rights of minorities to the mass media of the time, radio, while also knowing that we bear our own scars of racism and sexism, often at our highest levels. None of us are free from our collective past, though we can seek a different future, and wrestle with the things we must in order to reach that dream. As the great Oscar Wilde once wrote, “we are all of us in the gutter…but some of us are looking at the stars.” But if we only look at the stars, and offer the hope of a fluffy, polished dream without offering the work, the struggle of repairing that which has been broken, then we stay exactly where we are.

We may indeed have an uncertain future ahead of us and, frankly, the church has done itself no favors. Our particular “American Christianity” has warped the way of Jesus, we ought to have some fear about how we will now be received, and no reasonable expectation that any of the people we seek to welcome here at our church have a reason to trust church at all. We cannot do what we’ve always done, nor can we expect to present them with the same old model, with a few different words here and there, and hope to attract them. We will have to give to gain, we will have to humble ourselves to be lifted up, we will have to demonstrate the dream, to show the struggle we’ve all had with our faith as deeply as we can. It is precisely that wrestling match which must be on full display, giving people a sense of the contrition for our past, the hard work to repair that damage and the realization that it has scarred us, a limp we will carry as we seek a new blessing walking forward together and refusing to let go of Jesus simply because some people have co-opted him for their own bigotry and narrowness.

This story reveals to us a profound truth. Our deepest struggles are often the things that mark us the most and what give us the most profound wisdom, if we will hold on long enough to get such a terrible, wonderful blessing. Our “blessings” often dance (or wrestle) with our afflictions, and the distance between them is measured in our faith. A child with a chronic illness, the weight of deep depression, the inability to “get ahead” in a culture so driven by the illusion of independence, all of these are ways that we seem to be trapped by our identities, yet this story suggests to us that there is blessing to be found in that struggle – if we expose ourselves to possibility, if we risk connection, and if we trust in something bigger than what is happening to us in that moment..for blessing never seems to arrive alone, it always comes with injury – to our selves, our previous identities, maybe even to our bodies…faith leaves a mark.

And while I say that with full voice, I am NOT saying, nor should you hear, that suffering is biblically mandated. Pain may be a necessary component of growth, but hurt, inflicted on you by another or by you on someone else, is not what this story supports and upholds. Abuse is not biblical, nor is it holy. I’m not telling you to hold onto things that aren’t healthy for you – something being difficult is different than it being dangerous. This is a story about how we will seek and gain meaning, it is about who we are as human beings, and how we are in relationship with God, a God who will not just set life before us wrapped in a tidy package, but offers us life, death ad resurrection, the cosmic equation that asks us to wrestle with life, to seek our meaning, to find our blessing in the struggle, tightening our grip when it gets challenging.

In the midst of the broken relationships, the diagnosis, the bully, the depression…surrounded by work, deadlines, Atatiana Jefferson, the Kurds…in the grips of pain, loss, sobriety, and the struggle of growing up, which never really ends no matter how old we get, we must hold on like Jacob’s grip on the angel, refusing to let go of the idea that God is at work in our lives, that a just world is possible and that our identities are fluid, not static. God IS still speaking, and while it may seem like we stand on the river’s edge awaiting our death, literally and metaphorically, politically and socially, in the church and out of it, let me assure you that our task is actually to hold on, to lock our arms around a faith life that we are re-imagining, and to repair those broken relationships, for a new name awaits us…and a new blessing.

May God bless us in our holy wrestling.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

2 Kings 5:1-5a, 7-11 & 12b-15 (NRSV)
Luke 17:11-19 (NRSV)

In our culture, and the culture in which the Bible was written, your value determines what rights you have to a large degree. If you are seen as valuable, you have more rights, and if you are not seen as valuable, your rights tend to diminish if not vanish altogether. We use lots of factors to determine value in our culture, again many of the same indicators used at Jesus’ time. We use things like race, gender, age, ability and sexuality in individual terms, and then broader things like nationality, legal status, even what qualifies as “tribe” in our day and age, things like political party or on which side of an arbitrary border you might reside. And we often ascribe such discrimination to the will of God, which has the effect of making God seem inaccessible to those on the other side of our borders. That’s why I say – theology matters.

In the passage from Luke, these men who cry out to Jesus are lepers – or, in Greek, they have some sort of skin disease that renders them permanently “unclean,” or second-class. Their “value” determines their place in the world, it removes their rights and sets them aside. Later we’ll discover that one of them is even worse than a leper – he’s a leper who is also a Samaritan. In our culture, it’s like being a transgender Muslim, or a black woman – two strikes that almost add up to three. These men aren’t completely out, but they’re really, really close, and all of that is ordained by the dominant theology of that time and place.

Naaman, the central figure of the story from 2nd Kings, also has a skin disease of some sort, generically called leprosy, but the difference is that he has a class advantage the men in the gospel story don’t have, which has an impact on the theological oppression that might ordinarily be laid upon him. Even in our culture today people can be de-valued in multiple categories, each one closer and closer to the margins. And sometimes their definition in one category enables them, for the dominant culture, to “overcome” their definition in another, at least to a certain extent. Naaman is not rejected, but honored, despite the same ailment that ostracizes these ten men in the Luke story.

Naaman “overcomes” his infirmity because he’s immensely wealthy, a very powerful warrior, the commander of the army of King Aram. We should note that he does not beg for mercy nor wander the outskirts looking for a miracle, he seeks to deal with his ailment in the way that has garnered him respect and authority thus far – by conquering it. Only that doesn’t work. In all his effort, though he is a “mighty warrior,” he still suffers from this malady. It’s a chilling line, for how many of us try to will ourselves well, or seek to apply whatever skills we have for business or parenting or schoolwork or whatever it is in which we’ve found success, only to have that same effort fail in our attempts to be cured?

So, Naaman finds out he can’t get to wellness with all of the money and all of the power he has. He can’t buy healing, nor can he force his illness into submission. There’s no direct route, no single battle to win, no easy button. Finally, it is a message from a slave girl who tells him of this prophet in Samaria who could heal him. I will remind us that we should always pay attention in our Bible stories to the source of wisdom, to the voice in which God’s word is heard. So often it reveals the nature of God more than even the story itself. The action of healing or wholeness begins with an otherwise ignored voice, it starts with Naaman listening to a person he likely does not listen to very often, an unnamed slave girl. This micro-lesson that shows up again and again in our texts is that God often speaks to us from places we don’t anticipate, from the voices we ignore. We often decry God’s silence when what we should decry is our ears.

Meanwhile, off Naaman goes to see this mysterious prophet. And when he arrives, it’s also not what he expects. Already furious because Elisha sends a messenger rather than meeting him, a super important guy, in person, he rages at the suggestion that he must do some work for his healing…that he should wash himself seven times in the Jordan – which Naaman calls a “foreign” river. He’s already washed himself in the “truly holy” rivers in his country, why should he stoop to this inferior one? It’s a dismissive request to Naaman’s ears, the “take two aspirin and call me in the morning” of ancient healers. Frankly, he’s offended that he can’t simply buy his healing immediately. Maybe Elisha, with his prescription, senses that it’s more than a skin disease Naaman needs relief from at this moment.

Throughout both passages, healing is looked at from many angles. In the Luke passage, the Greek lets us see such exploration, for the words for cured and cleansed are both used, kind of back and forth, though we sometimes lose some of that in the translation. Is it made clean or cured, which are different things to us, or is it the phrase “made whole,” which is kind of like healing, but not really? And then, finally, the word that we get translated as “whole” or “well” in the phrase “your faith has made you well,” is actually the word sozo, the same Greek word we typically translate as “saved,” as in salvation. So what’s going on here? Jesus hears the cry of men that Luke identifies very specifically (and unusually for typical Greek grammar) as leprous men, not lepers, as if they are human beings who happen to have a skin disease, instead of being identified by their malady first and foremost. So, is the healing the removal of such identifiers, letting them been seen first and foremost by their humanity? Then Jesus sends them away to see the priest, the person in that culture who would have to announce them no longer unclean and as they turn to go to this place they’ve undoubtedly been before, to ask the priest once again for something they’ve already pleaded for, they were made clean. Does that mean no longer leprous?

In this story, Jesus is traveling along the border between Samaria and Galilee, the same Samaria Naaman travels to for healing. Jesus walks to Jerusalem via the in-between place so to speak, he walks intentionally on the borderlands. It was a place of division then, and today there is a literal wall there, dividing the West Bank from the southern parts of Israel. In that same place today, as well as borderlands in many other parts of the world, the idea of foreigner is deeply entrenched in society, coloring almost everything that happens. Being “cured” is a complicated prospect in this story because it means the healing of a physical ailment, but also social, psychological, even spiritual healing.

It is possible to see this story as a simple tale of the grandness of God’s mercy, given even to the worthless and pathetic. You can also see it as a sign of God’s grace given out freely to all, with no restrictions. I will leave it to you to decide what is happening here, whether this is a physical healing of a skin disease, or the metaphorical healing of a broken heart, or the spiritual healing of a cultural bigotry that is based on something created entirely by human incapacity to embrace diversity and only blamed on God. I will leave it to you to decipher the mystery handed to us by Luke who gives room for our hearts to make all kinds of interpretations and then asks us with his larger gospel story to consider…what would Jesus do?

It is also possible to see both of these stories as theological claims upon us, presenting how God works in ways that are decidedly different than the ways we expect. So often the Luke passage is lifted up as one of gratitude, that we should be thankful for what God can do for and with us, and that’s not incorrect. Yet, if we see only this and ignore the ways that Jesus interacts, who God heals, who God speaks through and with, and how Jesus frames the requirements for God’s healing…all of those things are theological claims that ought to shape us as much as gratitude. Amongst the confusion about what kind of healing is going on, both Elisha and Jesus impart the clear message that there is room for all sheltered in God’s Love…and that theology speaks louder than words.

Not all healing is physical, and not all things can be healed, of that we are very certain. When we cannot heal a physical malady, or rid a person forever of a mental illness, what then? Is there nothing left for us if the prognosis isn’t good, if the condition is chronic, if the healing that we expect never comes? Or does our language of God’s healing carry forth anyway, knowing that there are always layers to our therapies? The stories suggest that God wants our wholeness, and that wholeness has components to it – physical, psychological, spiritual. They suggest that healing may have as much to do with our acceptance, our inclusion, as anything. I wonder, for instance, if, after the healing that Jesus imparts, the other nine men tell this Samaritan to get lost? Their unity had been based in identification of a common disease, but that’s something they no longer share. So now, he’s just another Samaritan, someone to be rejected. He heads back to Jesus to give thanks, yes, but perhaps also for refuge, refusing to accept that he has been healed from one barrier only to be dropped into another. And Jesus makes it clear that his recognition of his own liberation from marginalization, shown in his gratitude, is the thing that brings true healing, the thing that brings him salvation. He understands that he is home and it’s his task now to bring that same message, that same feeling, to others.

Interestingly, the Hebrew suggests something beyond a cure of a skin disease as well. Keep in mind that throughout this story it has been the most marginalized who moved the plot. It’s a slave girl from Samaria who first suggests Elisha, then its the other servants who talk Naaman into washing in the river when he’s offended at the suggestion. It’s those on the edges who Naaman barely acknowledges and only rarely listens to who deliver the action of God. While his entourage of slaves watches, Naaman demeans himself, in his mind, and dips himself seven times in the humble Jordan. And then, the Hebrew says, he is tehar, a clean which denotes ritual purity. But it also notes that his skin is like that of a young boy, na‘ar in Hebrew, which also, significantly, means ‘servant’. Perhaps Naaman, like the Samaritan in Luke’s story is healed in more than one way.

So, when Naaman finally submits to the remedy prescribed, setting aside some of his preconceived notions, he is cured, the story tells us. He begins, perhaps, to see the world differently and he returns to Elisha to give him a cash reward, but Elisha refuses the gift, claiming that he does this for the Lord, whom he serves, modeling for Naaman a better way to be grateful than a transactional payment. And Naaman then asks for something strange – two cart-loads full of earth from around Elisha’s home, for Naaman has found a new home…he has found there in Samaria something that he could never have had in his homeland…his heart has changed a little bit, and wants to take the very earth around him to be reminded with every prayer from that day forward.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring a theme that comes to us from one of our traditional hymns here at Fellowship – one we sing at the end of every congregational meeting – Blessed Be the Tie That Binds. We’ll be asking, what binds us together, church? I’m ultimately going to suggest to you that it is a theology – a theology that differs from what we walk in here having absorbed, through direct contact or osmosis in the buckle of the Bible Belt. A theology which hopes for healing – deep, complete, whole healing that changes us, and then the world around us…welcoming people who have been rejected, including people who have been excluded…a theology that asks us to build a home, not only for us, but for all who would seek it…a theology that sees mercy and contrition in the act of reparations or the effort to uncover mass graves…a theology that wishes and hopes for the best in all of us, and gives the benefit of the doubt as freely as the gift of grace has been given to us.
May God’s Grace and Love, which has guided us thus far, continue to guide us.
Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

2 Timothy 1:1-14

Scholars have significant disagreement about the authorship of this letter that is traditionally called 2nd Timothy – not “2” Timothy. The traditional take is that this is one of the last letters of Paul, but there are problems with that. First off, the vocabulary is different in this letter than in other, earlier letters of Paul. And the timing isn’t right, for the earliest manuscripts we have of 2nd Timothy arrive after the known death of Paul. It’s also hard to reconcile a Paul who praises women deacons and leaders and says, in a letter to the church in Galatia, that “in Christ” there is no male or female with a Paul, in 2nd Timothy, says that women must be submissive to men in the same church that is supposedly “in Christ,” too. So, most scholars these days believe that this was a letter written after the death of Paul but attributed to him, a letter written to a Timothy who seems weighed down by infighting and pettiness in the church, wondering deeply if his faith even matters.

So, while we have in some of the pastoral epistles like Timothy a collection of later church writings that demonstrate how the church was becoming more like culture in ways that are disheartening, this is also a letter about being faithful, or living faithfully in the midst of injustice, and maybe we don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. For this letter has something to say about the necessity of faith being more than respectability politics or “niceness,” but rather messy and disruptive transformation. And the call for us to claim what being faithful really means, even if we don’t agree with the letter’s later assertion on what that is, seems a quite poignant one, particularly on a World Communion Sunday where the whole church is supposed to get together to share a meal. And we all know what happens when the family gets together for a meal, right? So, instead of not talking about religion or politics, in the spirit of disruptive transformation, let’s talk about both. After all we have values as Christians, values that often get held up as line items, or weaponized against people, and it can be very confusing trying to discern how to live faithfully in this world.

Case in point – this week brought to us another critical verdict around the murder of an unarmed black man, this time in Dallas, Texas where the trial of former Dallas Police Officer Amber Guyger took place for the murder of Botham Jean, a man who was shot to death in his own home, eating a bowl of ice cream, by Ms. Guyger, who mistakenly entered the wrong apartment thinking it was hers and, within 5 seconds of seeing Mr. Jean, shot him dead without ever doing so much as announcing herself as a police officer.

Ms. Guyger, much to many’s surprise given the historical record of such trials, was convicted of murder and sentenced to 10 years in prison. What has been all over the news, however, is the remarkable act of Brandt Jean, Botham’s younger brother, who, in the family testimony portion of the trial post-verdict, forgave Ms. Guyger from the witness stand and then asked the judge if he could give her a hug, a hug she embraced as if it was the first time she’d had human contact in 10 years. The impact was immediate. Brandt Jean was lifted up almost as a hero, with dedications to him coming from many different avenues, and largely, I will note, from white people.

That’s one way that we often see things differently, or through different lenses, when it comes to so-called “justice.” There are many who might see the face of Jesus in black forgiveness from Brandt Jean or from the members of a Charleston, South Carolina church, but then fail to see the face of Jesus in black outrage at injustice, as if Jesus didn’t forgive people and also turn over the tables in the temple, driving people out with a whip…as if we can’t acknowledge an individual act of forgiveness as remarkable and important while also decrying the systemic oppression and injustice that gives rise to such an act. While we can remember the Jesus whose life is marked by forgiveness and non-violence, we must also balance that with the Jesus whose life was a threat for the powers that be, whose oppressed body spoke up and out against the religiously supported authority, and whose death came not because of hugs, but because of truth spoken openly and boldly in a crowd.

Brandt Jean’s forgiveness is just that – his forgiveness. It is not yours or mine, nor even his own family’s. Let us not forget, in the midst of this praise, to hear the words of Allison Jean, Botham and Brandt’s mother, who supports Brandt’s decision as something she and her husband are working towards, and also told the court, “While we walk as Christians, we still have a responsibility to ensure that our city does what is right.” She lifts up the need for both forgiveness and justice, for the work on this individual case of the murder of her son and the systemic, perpetual injustices that continue, a balance that seems challenging, particularly as forgiveness is highlighted so deeply, seeming to deliver a sense of shame to those of us who follow Jesus and aren’t yet ready to forgive, those who see grace as a critical goal, yet still feel deeply the need for outrage and resistance.

Maybe we find ourselves this morning trapped in some of the same atmosphere that this “Paul” exposes in his letter…twisted and tempted by the values of the culture up against our call to the Gospel, confused about what to do when it seems that a Church can lift up an individual act of forgiveness a coat it in sugary sweetness, but says nary a word about rampant, obvious and brutal injustice present in the systems which we have helped to build and support. As I have been a party to and a witness of the interpretation of this week’s events in Dallas, I have noted a few things. By and large, the justice-loving folk are confused by forgiveness and the forgiveness-loving folks are confused by justice, which leaves us all a little confused. In addition to a very real racial divide on interpretation, one that indicates the very long and very traumatic differences between white people’s general experiences with a so-called justice system and people of color’s general experiences with a so-called justice system, there seems to be a theological divide, too.

Is forgiveness something we’re supposed to do as a nice gesture, showing our good, clean, Christian hearts? Or is it a sign of our discipleship, an effort to push towards something that is difficult, the work of seeking God’s love in a world of suffering by leaning into it? Or is it, along with things like reconciliation and redemption, something that each of us must work out in our own hearts, as Paul also said, with fear and trembling? Forgiveness is not a punch-line, not an tranquilizing pill. It is not meant to silence nor suppress. Forgiveness, as Drew G.I Hart said on social media in response to this very event, “isn’t the suppression of genuine indignation or pain. Forgiveness…should be paired with truth. And the only path to restorative justice for the oppressed & the oppressor requires repentance,” he concludes, “and reparations from the wrongdoer.” Justice and forgiveness have a symbiotic relationship, but they are not necessarily connected. There can be forgiveness without justice, and there can be justice without forgiveness, at least justice in the way that we think of it. Justice is complicated, too. After all, what possible sentence could Ms. Guyger have received that would have righted the scales? How many years would it have taken to equal Botham Jean’s life? True justice, I am more and more convinced, comes only from God. But we ought to at least have accountability. And true forgiveness can only come where there is accountability.

I think one of the reasons the video of the hug is so widespread is that it supports the false sense of resolution. See, everything’s OK now. Only the Gospel does not tell us that everything is OK. It tells us that God is with us and we are to set aside our fear in the name of a Jesus who is reconciling the world to God. It asks us to take up our cross, being willing to stand in the darkness, presenting our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, knowing that if we numb the darkness we numb any chance of light as well. If we repost and praise and highlight when black folks show mercy, but are silent when they cry for justice, we are discounting the amount of work it takes to make forgiveness more transformative than a hug.

How will we heal if we don’t stay in that discomfort, at least long enough to learn what we need to learn about ourselves and one another? For we cannot just see this moment of forgiveness from a single person and forget all of the injustice present in the systems we have built. We cannot watch the tender moment, wash our hands and return to business as usual. Especially not THIS morning, where we come to this table to re-imagine the world, along with the rest of Christendom. Here, where Christ comes again to tell us the story of his strength from vulnerability, his power gathered and given away, his very body broken for us, his blood shed in an act of love that he asks us to repeat not by becoming another martyr, but by sharing this meal, by guarding, this good treasure given to us freely, a gift of grace given to us in Christ Jesus who, Paul writes, abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel…a Gospel, by the way, that Paul consistently says he suffers for, he wrestles with, he is afflicted by…for this is not easy work, this being a Christian. It if only reinforces your already held assertions, you might want to reassess. If it lifts up a moment of forgiveness, but never speaks of the weight of injustice, you might need to reconsider.
If it makes you entirely comfortable and at ease, you are likely doing it wrong.

We should be troubled by the injustice in the world, bothered by the brokenness we see around us, and maybe even feeling the same sense of confusion about our own faith family that Timothy apparently feels. After all, we belong to a much larger Church that often seems confused about what it means to be faithful. We belong to a much larger tradition that has supported, even created, some of the great injustices around us. Yet I will still suggest to us the same thing that this “Paul” suggests to Timothy from a jail cell…keep the faith. Hold to the standard of sound teaching that you have heard…the teaching that demands we are our brother (and sister’s) keeper…the teaching that tells us that what we do for the least of these we do for Jesus. Guard this good treasure entrusted to you, Paul reminds us, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.
With this meal, remember again why it is that this way of Jesus is so compelling to you, renew in you that spirit of hope, love and solidarity. Come to this table and share a meal with not only the people here, but people everywhere, whose stories are different, whose experiences are contrary to our own, and whose lives – we are told in the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the wine – matter just as much to God as ours.

May God’s grace be with us all.

Amen.